Designing and deploying an efficient SDP, together with supporting business processes, will be one of the most important projects that operators undertake over the next couple of years in order to stay competitive.

Fast launch of new services involves the reshaping of the whole service lifecycle management process in a telecom company. As far as possible, business processes and the supporting technologies must be prepared in advance and be reused for each new service being launched.

The SDP should provide a set of horizontal functions that can be used by many different services in various stages of the lifecycle. Building the SDP on SOA principles, with standard software components and protocols, will ensure that there is plenty of competence available for its future operation, maintenance and evolution, and keep operating costs to a minimum. The SDP can be developed gradually as dictated by the needs of the services it will support.

IMS will be the technology that evolves the SDP. The capabilities of IMS will significantly enhance the user experience of multimedia services.

Reprinted with Permission from http://www.ericsson.com